Events
Concert | 100 years of OS FIDALGOS DA CASA MOURISCA
16.10.2021 | 17:00 | Cinemateca
The original score by composer Armando Leça (1891-1977), purposely written for the silent Portuguese film OS FIDALGOS DA CASA MOURISCA (Georges Pallu, 1920), will be performed live by the Metropolitana Soloists at the Cinemateca, on October 16th, at 5 pm, marking the centenary of the premiere of this film. Armando Leça's score was reconstructed by a team of musicologists from NOVA FCSH, in the context of a research project by the Instituto de Etnomusicologia – Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança (INET-md).
This is the continuation of a partnership established in 2019 between Cinemateca, Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa and the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, through INET-md, and now renewed with two more partners – the Coliseu of Porto and Agora. Its objective is the reconstitution, live interpretation and recording of the three original scores composed by Armando Leça for Invicta Film films: A ROSA DO ADRO (G. Pallu, 1919), presented in 2019 and already edited on DVD by Cinemateca; THE FIDALGOS OF CASA MOURISCA (G. Pallu, 1920), presented this month; and AMOR DE PERDIÇÃO (G. Pallu, 1921), which will be presented next November, with a special guest appearance by Nicholas McNair.
Musical program
Music for the film OS FIDALGOS DA CASA MOURISCA, by Georges Pallu (1920)
Composer: Armando Leça (1891-1977)
Transcription and edition: Bárbara Carvalho (CESEM - NOVA FCSH)
Adaptation of the score to the existing copy of the film: Bárbara Carvalho and Manuel Deniz Silva
Metropolitan Soloists
Filipe Freitas: oboe
Alexêi Tolpygo, José Teixeira: violins
Irma Skenderi: viola
Ana Cláudia Serrão: cello
Vladimir Kouznetsov: double bass
Tinoco Choir: harp
Paulo Oliveira: piano
Cesario Costa: musical direction
Sobre a partitura de Armando Leça
Armando Leça's second collaboration with Invicta Film, the music of OS FIDALGOS DA CASA MOURISCA (1920) retains many of the elements that characterized the rhapsody of "the songs and dances of the Douro-Litoral" that the composer had written to accompany A ROSA DO ADRO (1919), in particular the recourse to the stylization of motifs from popular songs. In this score, however, Leça sought to achieve greater proximity between music and image, namely through recurrent themes that identify some of the characters and places in the narrative, as well as through the presence of the harp, an instrument that is played in the film by two of the main protagonists, Beatriz and Berta. One of the most significant aspects of this score is the fact that Leça decided to musically accompany the narrative in a discontinuous way, contrary to what would become the usual practice in silent cinema in the twenties. Thus, the musical sequences characterize only some of the film's narrative blocks, being interspersed with deliberate moments of silence, which reinforce the autonomy of the musical commentary and create a unique relationship between sound and image.
The restoration of the score for OS FIDALGOS DA CASA MOURISCA was carried out by a team of NOVA FCSH musicologists from the sources in the composer's estate, kept in the Music Area of the National Library of Portugal. These sources, which consist of Armando Leça's autograph manuscript and several handwritten copies of the parts of each instrument, contain various indications of synchronization. However, these indications were added throughout the different public presentations of the score in 1921 (Lisbon, Coimbra, Guimarães, Porto) and correspond to the original intertitles of the film and not those of the copy that came to us, so the present synchronization results the crossing and critical study of different surviving sources.
